Problems with character encoding

[Thodoris <tgol@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello list,
    I know that what I'm about to ask does not concern databases 
exclusively but please guys help. I am retrieving all the records from a 
mysql (myisam) table using PDO and I am trying to write it to an 
spreadsheet using php. Whenever I use English while writing into the 
spreadsheet everything works smoothly but when I use greek retrieved 
from the database nothing seems to do the job. I have used 
utf8_encode/utf8_encode, iconv and I have just compiled multi-byte 
encoding into php (mbstring) and used mb_convert_encoding() to convert 
the encoding but it still doesn't do the trick for me. Does anybody have 
previous experience concerning charset encoding in order to help me.

Thanks in advance.

PS: I am writing in sreadsheet format using Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer 
pear module*
*

--
Thodoris